Re: Misspelled domain name scam

From: Maria Gilpin <mgilpin_at_amazingmedia.com>
Date: Thu 17 May 2001 16:04:16 -0500

JANET FOUTS <fouts_at_foggy.com> WROTE:

> Our domain name is tatu.com
> a company recently began to frame our site with his
> own, with no reference to their own company at all.
> doesn't make sense why, but I apparently can't make
> him stop...The addresses showing up in my logs are:
> http://www.tatueeka.cjb.net/
> http://eekajatatu.cjb.net/
> http://www.eekajatatu.cjb.net/
>
> Weird huh?? We have had fans of the site actually steal '
> pages and post them on their site in the past, but they
> always backed down after a few e-mail exchanges.
> this is different..

The "company" framing your site may very well be using
your site to cheat advertising networks. We're an on-line
marketing solutions provider and maintain a network of
web sites on which we purchase advertising space. We
have many applicants to our network who routinely submit
other sites as their own.

When a network agrees to buy space on the pirated site,
the "publisher" gets paid for fraudulent activity. We
caught on to this scam some time ago and now have a
process in place to identify the pirated sites. Usually
the tip-off is a domain name which does not match the
content of the site, just like the addresses you're
seeing in your logs.

If this is the case with the person framing your site,
one course of action might be to keep an eye on them...
if you notice advertising showing up on domains, they're
scamming their advertisers. You can then notify the ad
network buying the ad space and let them know that the
site has been pirated. You'll hopefully put the
so-called publisher out of business if all of his
advertisers terminate his accounts.

On the other hand, they might just be using your site
as a decoy for getting ad sponsorship. If that's all
they're doing, no ads will ever appear on the framed
sites. In that case, I'm not sure what you could do.
I'm guessing you've spoken to your attorney about
this by now. If you haven't, they might be able to
help.

Good luck!
Maria Gilpin
Amazing Media, Inc.
maria_at_amazingmedia.com
www.amazingmedia.com



Received on Thu May 17 2001 - 16:04:16 CDT